


These Hues Yet Hard to Hold

by sprx77



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Gen, I would like to note now that Sasuke and Naruto's first touch was a kiss, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, The boldness indicates how much they will matter/affect you, aka the 'my lips are orange because my soulmate kissed me before any other touch' club, color and intensity of color determined by how influential, dick grayson and sasuke uchiha, everyone who'll have an impact on your life leaves a handprint the 1st time they touch you, it's canon, soulmate aus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-15 02:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8039425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: Gaara muses on how odd it is for the first touch he shares with a soulmate to be on his face. Who touches someone for the first time on their face? What ninja lets anyone get so close?Naruto’s face is a Technicolor masterpiece by the time he is 17. A platonic (or not) soulmark AU where you leave colors on each other's skin the first time you touch.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen it prompted on tumblr but the first time I saw it used in a fic was "Oil and Watercolor" by dedicatedfollower467.
> 
> Or: how people in Naruto would get soulmarks ft. Orochimaru the Parent of Mitsuki feels courtesy of Blackkat.
> 
> Edit: ruletheworld pointed out that Orochimaru and Jiraiya touched twice for the first time, which I didn't notice in my initial revising. It has been corrected, edited, with a few new scenes. Thanks a lot!!

Kurama looks ridiculous with a small patch of bright orange fur. It clashes with his crimson pelt instead of blending in, stands out proudly, draws the eye. His own fist dyed Naruto’s red the day they became allies in full.

-

Sasuke’s lips are obnoxiously, permanently, vividly orange. The color is so opaque that no flesh is visible beneath it.

Naruto’s are an electric blue-white.

-

Naruto has sunshine yellow handprints, disproportionately huge, on his neck and shoulder, his left thigh. His father held him gently but tight, frantic to keep him safe, when he was a day old and the marks have only grown with him.

A deep gold handprint has always been visible on the side of his face. A thumb across his cheek, his ear and neck covered, the meat of someone’s palm brushing his jaw. The same color is a patch on his temple on the other side of his face.

(The first time his mother touched him, she cradled his face to hers so that their foreheads touched; held him close like he was precious.)

-

Gaara has the exact same marks, in the color of wet-sand.

(Two frantic mothers weakly cradling newborn sons, desperately trying to protect them in their first hours of life; no mother wants to make a sacrifice of their child).

Gaara will never see the mark he left on her; he still carves the kanji into his forehead.

It’s his only mark. Even if someone wanted to touch him instead of run in fear, his sand armor is not skin. No one breaks through it.

Until Naruto _does_ , slamming his forehead into Gaara’s and cracking the armor. A starburst of orange appears, between the cracks like broken glass, giving him the oddest soulmark of anyone he knows.

How odd it is for the first touch he shares with a soulmate to be on his face. Who touches someone for the first time on their face? What ninja lets anyone get so close?

-

Naruto’s face is a Technicolor masterpiece by the time he is 17.

A mint-green fist-print crosses his cheekbone from the first time Sakura punches him in the academy. (Sunset, vibrant and bold, had painted itself across her first three proximal phalanges).

Once an old lady flicked him across the forehead with the strength of a hundred men. She said something about him fainting—it was a hard hit; he probably would have been knocked out if not for Kurama. It took days for the bruising to fade; nearly a week for him to realize that the circular purpling at the bottom of Gaara’s red, jagged starburst wasn’t going to heal no matter how much chakra his tenant shoved at it.

His first kiss left his lips stained with lightning, oil to the watercolor of less influential, translucent soulmarks. Almost all of Naruto’s soulmarks are like that.

-

Sarutobi left a smudged thumb print from his nose to his cheek, a shaky but absentminded brushing motion to remove his parent’s blood from his face, about two minutes after he was orphaned. The hokage didn’t expect to pull his hand away and see a leaf-green, faintly-pigmented soulmark left behind.

It was just another way, he thought grimly, that his carelessness would affect the boy’s life.

That same day—that same hour, as loathe as he was-- Sarutobi had to give the infant to Jiraiya. Sick with grief, sick with the necessity, they checked the seal before anything else.

Jiraiya had to live with the deep red handprint on his godson’s abdomen, right over the seal; he had to leave Minato’s son to anonymity, a dark burgundy mark with no name or loved one attached to it, and hoped the color didn’t signify that his absence from Naruto’s life would have the most (worst) impact on him.

Minato and Kushina’s marks were both vibrant, after all; they were significant in his life despite knowing him only a day, because their deaths would brand him as an orphan, their choices leave him a jinchuriki. Soulmarks reflect in boldness the leaver’s influence on the life of the recipient.

-

Sasuke has bloodred fingerprints around his neck from where Itachi first held him, the color the second-brightest mark he has.

His clan members leave strangely bold marks, as well. Cousins handing him things, adults that catch him before he falls, aunts leading him home by the wrist and fingers.

Non-immediate family, even clan members, usually leave faint but distinct markings. They matter, of course, but don’t really affect or influence the lives of children not their own. Sasuke’s hands are covered and layered in watercolor rust-red-brown Uchiha touches, a beloved second-son of the clan head, adored and spoiled and touched often.

Itachi has the same marks in the same places. (His clan’s blood was on his hands his entire life; he just didn’t know it yet.)

Neither of them can get it off, no matter how hard they scrub.

-

Hinata made the seal of reconciliation with her crush after a dismal taijutsu match at the Academy, the first week of their year together. Her fingers come away orange. His are lavender and he exclaims in surprise. She tries not to be disappointed that the pastel color on his skin is several degrees more transparent than the solid neon she received.

-

After Haku’s parents died, no one had his mark and no one wanted it. Until Zabuza rescued him and their first touch left his master with ice-blue palms. Haku received a dark-blue mark to match. To his ceaseless awe, both marks were alike in boldness. He had someone precious once more.

When he woke up a young shinobi in the forest, he did so with the barest brush of fingers to the boy’s shoulder.

The ice-mark he left behind shocked his eyes wide open. The orange staining the tips of his fingers made him hesitate when they fought.

-

Naruto and Sasuke have wrists covered in matching handprints, white fingerprints from a brief, tight grip that immediately hurled them away from each other. Kakashi stopped them from connecting chidori to rasengan, excused them for the violence with only extreme disappointment in light of the ordeals they’d both been through with the clusterfuck that was the chunin exams.

-

Orochimaru leaves bite marks on a handful of victims, marking them personally with both the curse seal and a soulmark. His teeth rarely carry any color back with him; if they do, it is easily replaced by the next experiment’s.

-

Karin has tooth impressions all over her arms, some with colors, and some without. It is the first and last time so many touch her.

Sasuke grabs her wrist—which, wow, rude; Orochimaru ordered a _full_ physical—and leaves a bracelet of wreathed lightning behind, bright and electric.

He looks at her in mild surprise. Apparently this won’t be the last they see of each other. His hand comes away faintly orchid.

-

It’s so hard to get rid of his bonds when he wears them on his skin. It’s impossible to forget that the first time he touched the idiot, they kissed, because his lips glow neon in any amount of light. He sees them in the mirror and is forced to accept that it’s as bright a soulmark as his traitor brother’s.

It doesn’t have to mean anything.

-

Neither Naruto nor B touched knuckles to seal the deal of jinchuriki friendship. B didn’t want to cover even a little of Gyuuki’s pink-brown soulmark and likewise wanted to leave Naruto’s unmarked flesh for Kurama. Instead they exchanged a fist-bump with the sides of their hands, vertically, and came away with cobalt and orange, neither too dark nor too light.

-

Kakashi’s palms have marks of lightning and sunrise from his idiot students, but they are not nearly the first he receives. His mask covers the white droplets and lip imprints that his father left the first time he held his infant son, pressing a kiss to new skin even as he wept for the loss of his wife.

Guy left a dark green knuckle-smudge on his bare arms the first time he (nearly) got a hit in during a spar.

Rin left vivid, violet hand prints on his left side-- healed his ribs on the first away mission; he’d taken a kunai for Obito.

Obito himself never left a mark. Kakashi is sure that if he had, it would have been bright green, the blood of the leaf and the color of his loyalty, the village that he died for, and it would be as bold and influential as Rin’s mark, as Sakumo’s, as the yellow handprint Minato left on his shoulder, beaming with pride when he made chunin.

-

He’s fighting in an entirely different war when the lime green mark appears on his wrist, a punch that slid instead of connecting. He leaves his own white smudge on the enemy in the orange mask; the enemy with one sharingan eye shining through.

Kakashi has seen his mangekyo sharingan in the mirror, uncovered it just long enough to denote the pinwheel details for the records. The one looking back at him as the masked ninja snarls is identical.

Each mangekyo is unique.

Kakashi _kamui_ s his dead best friend into the dimension accessible only to them a full minute before Naruto would have come up with that plan. The fight turns out only a little differently; he hauls a formerly-brainwashed Uchiha home after the war is fought.

They make him Hokage and there’s only one reason why he takes the hat. Pardoning Uchiha Obito for his war crimes on the grounds of being POW for a year (and half mind-wrenched, half body-possessed by a sentient and insane plant creature for over a decade).

-

The first time Karin’s temper overflows and she slaps Suigetsu, she’s startled to leave an intense, purple handprint that takes up half his face. Her hand looks like she dipped it in the ocean and took the color away with her.

They are both of them shocked, horrified and indignant. It changes the tone of their relationship by only a few degrees; the change is enough to set them on an entirely different course.

-

Orochimaru’s parents left soulmarks bright enough to be statistically unlikely. It did not prepare him for the loss of them.

His teammates nearly did the same on numerous occasions when they were young.

Jiraiya, uncouth and bumbling, nearly left a burgundy half-mark every time he attempted to drag Orochimaru--by a loose grip on his hand--to see something or another. Orochimaru had barely dodged out of the way the first few times, to Jiraiya's hurt confusion, tanned fingers brushing past kimono sleeve rather than skin.

Nor did he ever comprehend, and each rude and frankly insulting (unwitting?) attempt prompted days of bewilderment at Orochimaru's lingering displeasure, his chill, careful distance. Orochimaru took to wearing a nude, snake-skin facsimile on his forearms, wrists and hands. The convenience proved itself again and again, a micro-thin layer of protection designed by his father, as a gift for his mother, for cosmetic disguise on the sort of missions kunoichi and feminine-passing others frequented.

He stopped deftly avoiding Jiraiya's ham-fisted attempts to drag he, and (less often) Tsunade, around.

The first time he grabs for Orochimaru's wrist and succeeds, he doesn't stumble for a moment, just grins and goes on with what he planned. Orochimaru is both a tad pink in the face and completely overwhelmed--  _no one_ has touched him since his parents passed, after all-- and has absolutely no room, he tells himself, for the bitter disappointment that blooms deep in his lungs that his teammate does not stop and look, stop and gawk, stop at  _all_ for what should be, so far as the idiot knows, their first skin-to-skin touch--

It does not hurt, he tells himself fiercely, and Jiraiya goes clumsily along looking so  _happy_ that Orochimaru can only follow, Tsunade trailing bemusedly behind, Sarutobi-sensei already apologizing to a vendor they've whirled by.

-

Tsunade left a purple slap across the pervert’s face that looked satisfyingly like a bruise their entire lives.

In a rather intimate moment, Tsunade left the same color over his eyes. She wiped his tears with her thumbs, forever branding him with purple crescent moons.

Her thumbs come away bloody; her knuckles are dyed maroon.

-

The day after the second bell test, Jiraiya breaks into his booby-trapped clan home and receives a vial-full of venom to the eyes. It's not corrosive to skin, and it is _extremely fortunate_  he closes his eyes in time to avoid instant blindness, but Orochimaru is still quick to wipe the excess drops from his skin, instruct him to keep the eyes closed as tightly as possible, and shove his head into a hastily-prepared solution of antidote.

Only after a thorough tongue-lashing does he realize the bloody, red streaks he’s given his teammate’s face from the unwitting first contact.

( _Well_ , Orochimaru reasons sourly, _it was either that or allow the venom to drip into his mouth_.

It was designed by his mother to protect his home. A _single_ drop had enough neurotoxin to kill something like 300 men once it got in the bloodstream, and _two_ of them had been halfway down the idiot’s face.

He never forgets the panic he felt that evening. His red-purple thumbs follow him through every change of vessel).

-

Jiraiya sees himself in the mirror full  _days_ later, the absolute moron, and  _really_ _,_ they are grown now, jonin in full, having fought a war at each other's sides.

Surely he has outgrown this sort of behavior, or at the very least could do Orochimaru the favor of  _pretending_ to have the common sense the Sage awarded a  _lemming--_ Orochimaru would settle for anything other than  _actively suicidal tendencies_ at this point, as he disables the traps mere instances before his teammate is impaled by senbon from all directions--

"Twice in one week!" He hisses, rage incarnate, but--

Jiraiya is undeterred, shock and something like anger on his face, but as he sweeps forward Orochimaru can see it melt into awe. He is twenty years and a full shinobi's life experience too old for blushing, he tells himself  _firmly,_ for all that it means nothing and the thought dissolves into so much nothing as his teammate takes his face into his calloused hands, softly.

His heart is beating at well-beyond resting rates and he  _hates_ himself for the lack of control, just as surely as he does nothing of the kind, too caught up in dark eyes and an expression like breaking dawn on a face that never hides it's colors, not even the ones accrued from recent years as a verging spy-master, water-color thumb-prints from whores and barmaids and showy frivolity--

_What shinobi lets someone so close?--_

Inches away, their breath mingles, Jiraiya's carrying the sweet mint of toothpaste.

Orochimaru can hardly breathe.

Jiraiya's eyes narrow, searching.

"I could have sworn we touched as kids, back when we were six and just starting out. Maa! Where the hell did I get that white mark on my shoulder, then?"

Usually so carefully restrained in times of great anger, Orochimaru's temper  _snaps_ before he can even register the urge to quell it. They level half his lab and then some, spilling out into the village proper. Clean up takes days and Orochimaru can't be bothered to  _care_ , he is so annoyed, he just needed to wring his fool teammate's  _neck_.

Jiraiya yelps and dodges and screams like an infant, causing just as much property damage in his escape as Orochimaru does in pursuit.

He is not sorry.

-

When Mitsuki’s gestation begins, Orochimaru ~~vows~~ plans to very deliberately leave his mark as a parent. The idea of it being an accident or careless mishap is unacceptable.

Those plans go out the proverbial window when the amniotic tank malfunctions two weeks before the child is meant to be born.

His son begins to drown.

Orochimaru brings full force to bear shattering the glass womb-cum-prison. He catches the still infant without regard to where his hands end up, desperately breathing life into tiny lungs. So small a being cannot possibly survive without air for the length of time it will take to get the proper equipment.

He uses fingertips to delicately force a small heart to beat.

When Orochimaru’s son takes his first breath, it is weak and his throat is likely sore from the drowning.

But he breathes.

Later, half-exhausted with relief, Orochimaru sees he’s left double handprints like red wings on the babe’s shoulder blades.

He cannot bring himself to regret the necessity.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team 7 is found-family and it shows on their skin.

Orochimaru hit him in the gut with five fingertips and twisted, fucking with his seal and leaving crimson marks ringing Jiraiya’s handprint.

-

Itachi shoves his entire arm down Naruto’s _throat,_ tinging the outline of his teeth dark red, his tongue and uvula dark red; checking for infection would be a bitch for him, Tsunade announced, if he’d ever have to deal with one.

-

Sai, the utter creeper, had no marks except his hand, palm a cheery auburn. He painted on fake ones for undercover missions. It was a Root thing, apparently, as if Naruto needed more reasons to burn the organization to the ground.

Danzo had to have known Sai as a traitor the moment he came back, because:

Team seven left their marks on Naruto’s face, Sai’d noted, weeks after deciding to learn from him about teamwork, emotions and bonds.

Sai couldn’t come right out and say, “I want mine there too, as much team 7 as the others” for all that he clearly broadcast it, eyes shadowed, lashes down.

He was close enough to touch, and that itself was an invitation--leaning close enough to share breath when he’d spent weeks (a lifetime) of careful distances, avoid every touch, every brush of fingers; it was a request, baldly hopeful, and Naruto _remembers_ having no living precious people.

He looks at Sai, goofy but trying, aloof but _trying_ , so lonely and in this moment revealing it, baring the vulnerability instead of hiding away.

Naruto can’t _not_ \-- not when he’s a teammate, a precious person, when Naruto himself still _aches_ to wear a little piece of everyone, physical proof of those bonds, bright colours saying people _want_ him, acknowledge him-- he can’t _not_ interrupt what Sai’s not saying, pull him in with a hand on his shirt.

Sai takes a quick breath that fans out over Naruto’s mouth, shaky, and almost balances with a hand on Naruto’s bare shoulder. He stops himself, hand poised uselessly, almost trembling-- not letting himself, with iron physical control, but showing it so obviously in his expression that he might as well have been.

Naruto draws him in slowly, gently-- a bit sleepily, if he’s honest; this isn’t exactly a hard choice-- and very intentionally slots their noses together, left side to right side.

This, he thinks, is the final damning of Root’s teachings: asking for a bright orange soul-mark on your face, willingly showing off, broadcasting, a bond, an emotional tie-- in blazing neon, no less.

Sai looks shocky, numb, and incredibly confused-- half happy, half surprised.

Naruto kisses him softly and not too carefully, a clumsy sleepy brush of lips, and drags him into bed. He throws an arm over his teammate and hikes the blanket back up.

-

Sai calls Sakura ugly and doesn’t dodge the punch.

He goes flying-- she is horrified; he is terrified anew by her strength, with a shattered chekkbone-- she rushes over to heal it-- but he raises a slow hand to the mint knuckle-marks left behind, half-stunned, half-awed.

Finally, he settles on smiling.

It’s almost a mirror reaction to how Naruto got the same mark in the same place. He crows; Sakura looks torn between chagrin (is she really so violent?), exasperation, and being proud beyond words.

 _Her_ marks on _her_ boys.

-

When Sakura and Lee spar-- and they do, in those three years, between “I don’t feel the same” and “That’s disappointing, but I’ll live”-- she stops him before they begin and offers.

“However you want.” She says, mostly meaning it. Her knuckles are Naruto sunset and her forehead has lilac brushstrokes to one side.

Tsunade had first done this, introduced the concept; a confident, no nonsense taking control of where you leave soulmarks on someone. It’s not chance.

You decide where it’ll happen, take fate into your own two hands.

Lee makes a show about thinking about it.

A kiss would make him happiest, obviously, but he visibly dismisses the idea before voicing it. Is it odd to ask for one on her face? He’s genuinely nice and doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable, she learns.

He asks for a touch on _his_ face, because even if she doesn’t feel that way about him, Lee wants to remember her influence on him and how he feels, always.

It’s overwhelmingly sweet.

Sakura brings the unblemished side of her hand-- from pinky to wrist-- to caress his cheekbone. . Hes knelt dramatically for it, but so earnestly she can’t laugh. He holds eye contact with her, utterly still, letting her do the touching. Around them, the trees ringing the training ground seem to hold their breath.

She feels in that moment a queen.

Peppermint curtains his cheek to his ear, dainty but vivid.

Sakura pulls her hand away dusted with gold.

-

When Naruto meets his cousin, after the war, Karin is surprised and animated in her disbelief.

“You use the last name Uzumaki!” She yells. “You’re blonde, where d'you get off?”

“My mom!” He shouts back, absolutely delighted despite the chakra-chains holding him in place. And this information is still new to most people, to the rest of Konoha who weren’t part of the handful at the final boss battle against Madara and Kaguya, so he hasn’t got to really say it.

“Uzumaki Kushina, the Red-Hot Habanero of the leaf! A Jinchuriki like me, dattebayo!”

The revelation that he is the fourth Hokage’s son spreads across the nations.

Naruto shouts it from every rooftop, but just as important is his mom, Kushina, whose chakra-chain gold he’s worn on his face since the day he was born.

Karin looks dumbstruck and is ill-prepared for the storm of hugs she receives in the next few hours. For Naruto, who has never had a family, her existence is a miracle.

They plan to scour the whole continent for any other refugees of Uzushiogakure.

Karin’s chakra-chains, whenever she summons them, look rusted in some places-- burnt orange, glowing cheerfully.

Naruto has the most interesting soulmark criss-crossing his whole body, chain links wrapped around him like an Uzumaki hug.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto becoming Hokage only makes sense if they're in a shonen manga and we're from the outside looking in; the actual world of Konoha knows better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short, but begged to be included.
> 
> (Also, commenter who asked for Iruka-- he put a brown smudge on the back of Naruto's neck that's in my concept art and notes but might not have made it into the actual fic. I'm not sure. Might edit that later. If I go into Iruka's marks, I have to find Iruka backstory and U-Z-U-S-H-I-O Iruka-fam has me like woah from Blackkat's blog. It would sprawl into a whole new series because to include Iruka, I have to include Genma. And Genma is shinobi denmother in my whole heart forever.)

Sakura is: the brush of sparkling lilac across her temple (pushing long bangs back; _“Smile, forehead girl!”_ ), the bruise of the Godaime Hokage’s fingers across her bicep ( _“Well, you’re going to be my student. Let’s get it over with. Where do you want it?”_ ), and gold dust from pinky to wrist.

Sakura is: sunset across her knuckles (dismay, denial, resignation, pride), lightning across her palm (the first time she was a shinobi instead of a little girl, treating not her crush but her dying teammate in a forest of death and traps and enemy-nin, wishing desperately for any amount of iryo-ninjutsu, any amount _at all_ ; later, a reminder; later still, a different reminder; finally, pride).

Sakura is: the splatters of colour from every patient she’s ever healed, like Tsunade before her, the watercolour washed fingers that mark her as a medic.

Only, Sakura healed thousands in war. The people see her coming and rejoice; every Konoha ninja has known her touch in the last three years; the dying and hopeless weep with joy and relief when she appears on a battlefield. The people know her and the people love her.

Why shouldn’t they?

She has the blood of Konoha on her hands and she would never, ever wash it off.

Sakura is: Nanadaime, and her fingertips on both hands are bleached white from taking the hat off her weary sensei-predecessor’s head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I'm serious. Any questions or squealing or commiserating or "BUT IMAGINE" or literally any form of comment or ask or feedback is always 100% welcome over at definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com/ask
> 
> Hit me up! I hope you enjoy :)

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to harass me on tumblr @ http://definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com , I always enjoy feedback and talking about this cast of ninja misfits.
> 
> Edit: I uploaded a sketch of what Naruto would look like in this 'verse, sans colour. I doubt yall wanna see the actual-coloured concept art of every single one I used for reference
> 
> http://definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com/post/152665574338/i-just-want-this-sunshine-idiot-to-be-happy


End file.
